A Blog

A Fun Weekend

So there I was Friday afternoon walking through the living room when I think I hear a funny noise. It sounds like static, which isn’t at all surprising considering the amount of electronics in the room, but I want to know what it is so I can turn it off. My wife walks through; she thinks she hears it too. “It’s somewhere in that entertainment center,” she says. I’m not so sure, because I’ve looked at the stuff in the entertainment center and nothing seems to be on. I walk around the room listening. I put my ear up to things. It’s odd. No matter where I go in the room, and no matter what I put my ear up against, I seem to be getting further away from the noise. It was an aural illusion. I try the speakers. Nothing. The Nintendo. Nothing. The satellite receiver, the dvd player, the Xbox.

Nothing.

Then I listen to the air filter. Ah! It’s louder. But it’s my left ear pressed up against the air filter, and the right ear, exposed to nothing but open room, is where I hear the sound. Then it strikes me. I lay on the ground. I listen to the floor. And I hear it. A raging river. A torrential downpour. Niagara Falls.

Short of open flames, I’m not sure of anything that can induce panic in a homeowner as quickly as the uncontrolled flow of water. So I grab a wrench and rush into the backyard to find the water meter and the cutoff valve. It takes a minute. I don’t believe in raking, and it’s under a thick carpet of dead leaves, but I finally find it and pull the top off to see it’s filled with water. Muddy water that I can’t see through. That left only one way to find the valve, so I reach my hand into the murky water and start feeling around. Fortunately, the water isn’t too terribly deep, maybe five inches or so. Unfortunately, it’s freezing cold, and beneath the layer of water is a layer of mud, and I still haven’t found the valve. I grab a plastic bowl off the back porch and start bailing out the water meter, and once I get enough water out, I start to dig. Finally, I find the cutoff valve, tighten the wrench, and shut it off.

Since I had just tapped the extent of my plumbing knowledge, I call our plumber to see when he can come out and fix our leak. Tomorrow morning sounds great. Gabe and I go to my parents’ house to get cleaned up for the night and to fill some jugs with water in case we need it, something I should have taken the time to do before I turned off the water.

Michael Burr of Michael Burr Plumbing, who always does a fantastic job for us, comes the next day to check it out. There is standing water under our house – fairly deep – but he crawls under anyway. A few minutes later he returns. He says he found the hole, he needs to go get some parts, and while he’s gone he’s going to pump out the water.

At least an hour passes, maybe a little more. The pump has been running the whole time, at what Michael says is 20 gallons per minute. For those of you who struggle with math, that’s about 1200 gallons of water pumped out from under our house and still there’s a couple of inches remaining. He dons his waders and crawls back in. A few minutes later he calls out to me, and I turn the water back on. He comes back with good and bad news. The good news is the leak is fixed and we’re not hemorrhaging water anymore. The bad news is it could happen again at other spots along the pipe. That’s okay. If it’s not an immediate problem, I can deal with it. Right then I’m just glad I can walk into my house and wash my hands.

So what caused this massive problem? What leaked over a thousand gallons of water under my house, and sounded like the sort of river you need a big yellow raft and a helmet to navigate?